Thursday, January 30, 2014

Yet another day of working and whining

I am so irritable right now that arguably, I should simply continue to refrain from any communication with the Outside World and just…smile politely a lot.

It’s one of those periods when there’s a perfect storm of work and personal crap, you know? I’ve got the flu and there’s all kinds of drama and then work is just…oh fer frick’s sake, people…and I find myself biting back all kinds of remarks that are just best left unsaid.

It’d be different if I had deserving targets. But I really don’t; nobody is stupid and nobody is incompetent and nobody is just being obstinate. Everybody is just trying to do their job as best they can under very trying circumstances.

Still.

I have to say, as a general rule, I am almighty tired of a couple things.

I’m a bit tired of being nagged half to death about the status of items that are pointless because no way in HELL this thing is going into production in two weeks.

Also, I rather wish folks would quit trying to “help” me accomplish more than can be done by pulling in other people to take on tasks for me. Half the time they don’t know how to do it, and the other half they’re going to need so much “knowledge transfer” time that I could have done it myself in less time than I spent talking about it, PLUS, they then did it exactly wrong sooooo, I just have to drop everything at the eleventh hour, scurry over there, and do it my damn self anyway.

And a lot tired of explaining the same things over and over again, only to have the same person react as if I just threw a rattlesnake onto his desk three weeks later, when he finally gets around to looking at it for the first time.

Extremely tired of having items failed by the QA team with vague ‘it didn’t work, please do the needful’ comments on them. Five…hours…later…they give me a customer claiming that this is the one they tested with and it didn’t end up right…and I look at it and go, “Dude, there is nothing wrong with this, see? You tried to update the social security number to ‘aardvark.’ That’s not a valid SSN, man.” “Oooooooooh, but, it should update it, because I was logged in as ‘admin.’” “nooooooo, it shouldn’t, because in addition to not being a valid SSN, ‘aardvark’ is also not a number. The field only accepts numbers. Even an admin can’t make aardvark be numeric…” “No, it should be updated. Because I logged in as admin.”

{head-desk} {head-desk} {head-desk} {head-desk} {head-desk}

And don’t get me started on ‘being a senior developer.’ Wait. Let me rephrase that. Being the senior developer.

Sometimes, I honestly wish I could rewind and go back to being less experienced. Or that I had some kind of instant mind-meld like technology by which I could simply infuse what I know into the minds of others. Because I am getting damned tired of my own team staring at me with ‘deer in the headlights’ expression when I’m saying something that to me, is not only really old news, but pretty basic.

Plus, I have nobody I can bounce ideas off of at work anymore. The best guy for that left a couple months ago, and the next best guy for that left last month, and that leaves me just the Internet when I’m wondering if I can solve this or that problem by doing such-and-so esoteric thing that I read about this one time on SqlServerCentral…

There really is no going back, I guess; it’s like the more I know, the more I know I don’t know; and then the fact that I know I don’t know kind of bugs me, and I find myself thinking I’ll bet if I just understood HOW this works a bit better, I’d know what to DO about it…and the next thing you know I’m up to my eyebrows in Little Known Facts™ about how the query optimizer actually works.

AND MOST OF ALL, the thing I am the most sick of and ready to just haul off and clobber the next person who displays it…is this kind of thing. Which seems to be how an awful lot of our management and business types react to any information that isn’t what they wanted to hear…

6 comments:

Hester from Atlanta
said...

Believe me your are not the only one who is frustrated with people who do not know what they are doing. And of course, it is all my fault. My fault that they don't know how to write a simple sentence, don't even know what common sense is, much less what passes for modern manners these days. Sometimes I yearn for the days before everyone had a computer and just because they have a computer they are experts. Well, not really, but come on folks, common sense matters!!!

Welcome to my world. I have spent most of the last year wishing I could clone myself but am frustrated at every turn by my line managers who insist that I can't hire anyone else "because there is spare resource in Glasgow" (who know sweetFA about anything we do 240 miles away and can't cope with anything outside their play book).